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Gaza clashes kill seven Palestinians at end of a bloody year
AFP, January 1,
2008
by Adel
Zaanoun
GAZA CITY, Jan
1, 2008 (AFP) - At least seven Palestinians were killed in
the latest round of internal clashes in the Gaza Strip,
medics said on Tuesday, as president Mahmud Abbas called for
unity after a bloody and divisive year.
A 12-year-old
boy, two other civilians, three Fatah supporters and a
member of the Hamas police were killed in exchanges of
gunfire during a rally east of the southern Gaza town of
Khan Yunis, medics said.
Abbas meanwhile
renewed calls for Palestinian unity in a speech delivered on
Monday at his Ramallah headquarters in the West Bank, where
his rule has been confined since his Fatah faction was
violently ousted from Gaza last June.
The Palestinian
leader, making a bid for unity at the end of a year that has
left his people more bitterly divided than at any time in
their history, said he was ready to talk to the Islamist
Hamas if it returned Gaza to his control.
"I call on
those who carried out the putsch... to open a new page,"
Abbas told Fatah officials gathered in Ramallah to mark the
43rd anniversary of the movement's armed struggle against
Israel.
Cooperation
between Fatah and Hamas should be based "on a partnership in
the heart of the fatherland and around the struggle for its
liberation," he said.
"No party
should supplant another. The putsch and the military edge
should not be a part of our vocabulary. Only dialogue should
prevail."
Senior Hamas
official Mahmud Zahar on Tuesday said his movement welcomed
dialogue but adamantly rejected the conditions Abbas set for
talks aimed at halting the factional struggle.
"President
Abbas has repeated the same declarations that he wants a
dialogue with conditions, and for us this is unacceptable,"
Zahar told a press conference in Gaza City.
"We in Hamas
are ready to lick our wounds and turn over a new page with
Abu Mazen (Abbas) for the sake of our people," he said, but
he went on to emphasise that the Islamist movement would not
accept any preconditions.
The latest
exchange between the warring parties came after a Fatah
rally in Khan Yunis dissolved into a shootout when the
Hamas-run security forces tried to disperse the crowds.
Another 45
people were wounded in the latest bout of violence to hit
the territory where the Islamist movement seized power after
a week of fierce street battles in June 2007, routing
Fatah-led forces loyal to Abbas. Following Monday's
incident, clashes between the rivals erupted in Gaza City
and the northern town of Beit Hanun as police arrested
dozens of people, including two journalists who were briefly
detained.
Later that
evening some 20 masked Hamas men arrested Ibrahim Abu
al-Naja, head of the Fatah high committee in the Gaza Strip,
at his home in Gaza City.
He was released
several hours later, but his moustache was shaved off in an
apparent attempt to humiliate him, his son said.
A Fatah
spokesman in Ramallah said Monday's killings were proof that
Hamas did not wish to begin negotiations.
"We strongly
condemn this new crime," Ahmed Abdel Rahman said in a
statement hours before the Palestinian territories welcomed
the new year.
"It is part of
a list of crimes by Hamas and its answer to president
Abbas's call to turn a new page and open dialogue with
Hamas." |
